


lights

by blackorchids



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Band, Artist Zayn, Christmas Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Meet-Cute, Painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:31:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn's an artist who wants to paint magic but he doesn't know how. He knows his inspriation is from the lights, but he doesn't know what a strange blonde boy has to do with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lights

**Author's Note:**

> for some christmasy december-prompt thing that i said i'd do but didn't really

Zayn’s not Christian, but even on his most broody days he can admit that London does Christmas very well. Oxford Street is positively gorgeous, hundreds upon thousands—probably even _millions_ —of twinkle lights are glittering and shimmering down over everyone that rushes past, trying to make it into the shops before the stores close for the night. Zayn’s not sure why they’re rushing—Christmas is still over three weeks away—but he can tell that they aren’t even seeing the most magical part of the season.

The first snow fell two days prior and fell it did—thick and fluffy and covering nearly everything. The streets have been plowed and the sidewalks have been shoveled, but the trees still have little heaps of the stuff on each branch and the benches haven’t been touched and in the few corners that feet hadn’t managed to reach were small piles of perfectly white fluffy white snow. Even it was reflecting the lights above and Zayn couldn’t understand how people could just walk right on by without even blinking.

London does Christmas very well and no one even notices.

*

Zayn’s half-screaming into his pillow, his easel knocked over, the previous piece of canvas he’d been working on wrinkled up in a soggy pile on the ground. All around the house, he can hear his sisters giggling and shrieking with laughter. They’re off school soon and positively ecstatic for the winter break. Zayn loves their laughter—it’s often the only thing that comforts him when he gets into one of his moods.

A soft knock on his door startles him and he wonders exactly when he stopped screaming and just started laying there, listening to his sisters’ joyful noises.

“Come in,” he says gruffly, turning a bit so he can watch his mother enter his room, her pretty brown eyes taking in the scene before her. It’s not a new development—Zayn _always_ throws fits when he can’t get his work to look the way he wants it to. All of the girls are used to it, really, and, by now, the only one who even bothers to make sure he’s alright is his mum.

“Zaynie,” she says soothingly, sitting at the edge of his bed and rubbing his back like she used to do when he was little and he was having nightmares. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m trying to paint magic,” he says, his eyes softening when she doesn’t even blink at how ridiculous it sounds. “But I can’t get it right.”

She rubs his back for a while longer before leaning over and grabbing the canvas on the ground, stretching it out before her so she can look at it.

“It’s very lovely, Zayn,” she tells him, because it’s _true_. Zayn’s a very good artist, and he could probably have a career in it, but there will always be his old art teacher’s words nagging in the back of his head, and it’s the reason why he has problems with every single thing he paints now. _It’s flawless, and that’s a problem. Your art lacks soul and passion and love. It’s completely standard text-book, and people will love it, but it won’t be something that moves them._

Zayn’s teacher died two years previously, a few months before he graduated high school, but Zayn hasn’t ever forgotten his words. He knows that when it’s right, he’ll know, but it hasn’t been right yet. And that’s very frustrating.

“You’ll get it,” his mother says at last, because she knows what he’s thinking, just like she always does. “I know you will.”

Zayn will never get used to how much faith someone else has in him, but his mother has never once doubted him and the only thing he’d ever really enjoyed—drawing and painting. He’s twenty years old and he still lives with her and his sisters because he wants to make a living off his art. A boring desk job would crush his soul, his mother says, ruffling his hair every time the topic comes up, and that’s that.

“I sure hope so,” Zayn replies, smiling faintly at her as his eyes slip closed.

*

Zayn finds himself seated on his usual bench, watching hundreds of people rush by, not giving a single thought to the magic all around them. Snow had fallen once more that day and the fresh whiteness of it all only adds to the overall effect. The twinkle lights are beautiful as always and Zayn will never _not_ marvel over the fact that not everyone is taken away by their beauty.

It’s half an hour later and vague shouting startles the brown-eyed boy out of his reverie. Across the street and a little to his left, there’s a figure sprawled across the damp pavement, another one leaning over and yelling. Zayn’s on his feet and across the street before he can even register what’s going on, and he hovers around for a while, making sure that some sort of _brawl_ isn’t about to erupt.

But now that he’s closer, he can make out the words being said.

“—you lazy sod, why don’t you just _get up_?” The sandy-haired boy is saying to the blonde one on the ground. Zayn thinks they look around his age and he wonders why he’s not seen them around before. There were a surprisingly large amount of regulars that walked back and forth Oxford Street every single night.

“I’m looking at the lights; aren’t they beautiful?” comes a heavy Irish accent and Zayn balks.

“Right,” says the standing boy dubiously, glancing around at the irate looks he’s receiving from bloody well _everyone_ , “Well, I’ll be back later, Niall. Don’t get trampled.”

*

Zayn’s mother stares at his latest wrinkled piece of canvas. “It’s downtown,” she says, “I know that. But what is that lump on the ground—did a tree branch fall?”

Zayn presses his lips together and tells her that, yes, he found magic in that broken tree branch.

*

For the next three nights, the blonde boy— _Niall_ —is there across the street from Zayn’s usual bench, inexplicably _laying_ in the middle of the sidewalk. The regulars have gotten relatively used to him, but the people who’ve come up for the weekend stare with little shame as they pass.

It always starts off the same way too. When Zayn gets there early in the evening, hoping to be inspired to finally paint something magical, the boy isn’t there. And then, suddenly, around nine or ten o’clock, Zayn blinks away for a moment, and then he is, his friend loudly telling him to get up before giving up and going on his way.

It’s night five when Zayn switches his bench to the one on the same side of the street, right next to where the other bloke lays down. It’s not like Zayn spends his entire night at Oxford street on his bench staring at the blonde Irishman, he just notices things that other people don’t.

The boy— _Niall_ , Zayn reminds himself—doesn’t appear to notice this new development as he collapses onto the ground and argues a bit with his friend before, as always, his friend leaves, shaking his head disbelievingly as he goes.

“S’cold down here,” says an Irish voice some twenty minutes later and Zayn’s head whips around so he can look at the blonde, his eyes embarrassingly wide. But Niall’s not even looking at him and Zayn wonders if he even said anything at all.

“Sorry?” he says, his voice even quieter than usual.

“S’cold down here,” Niall repeats, turning his gaze to Zayn. Zayn wants to reply with something witty that has to do with the fact that of course Niall’s cold—he spends entire evenings laying out on the wet ground. But Zayn’s caught in the shockingly blue gaze that are Niall’s eyes, and even from three feet away, he can see that they’ve got about a million different kinds of blue.

“Oh,” Zayn says at last, but Niall doesn’t seem to notice, his blue-eyed gaze already turned back towards the lights.

*

The next morning, Zayn’s mother stares at his painting of an ocean for a very long time, her eyebrows raised curiously.

“You did say that you went to Oxford Street, right Zayn?” she asks and Zayn wonders if she can see his face flushing. He feels as though it’s suddenly a hundred degrees inside his small bedroom.

“Er,” he mumbles, “yeah.”

She looks around his room, filled to the absolute max with his full-size mattress—no frame—his dresser, his easel, and about a million shoe boxes filled with paints and brushes and canvas. There is a picture of him and his sisters and his mother hanging on the wall above his bed and that’s it.

“Zayn, do we need to have a talk?” she finally asks and that does it. Zayn’s pulled the duvet up around his face and he’s yanking in all the edges so that she can’t possibly get in, and shouting protests that, _no_ , they don’t need to have a _talk_. Zayn’s mum laughs, her tinkling giggle a bit breathless and Zayn smiles underneath the blanket when she kisses the exact spot where his forehead is and quietly leaves the room.

*

The days are even shorter than before and the weather is positively brutal, but Zayn continues to spend every second he can sitting on the bench, his head tilted up towards the darkened sky, his brown eyes tracing every single rope and strand of lights, stretching between buildings and across the street and around light posts and branches and tree trunks and windows and he still can’t understand why no one seems to notice how perfect they are.

Well, Niall still shows up every night to lay on the ground and stare at the lights, but Zayn is beginning to think that this is some sort of mass hallucination, because no one could _possibly_ actually be spending all this time looking at the lights. Zayn does because he’s trying to be inspired, but Niall doesn’t really seem like the artsy type.

But when Niall shows up the next evening, without his friend, and sits himself down next to Zayn on the bench, the brunette boy nearly has a heart attack.

“Hi,” Niall says, leaning eerily close to him, a grin pulling at his pretty pink lips.

“Er,” Zayn says, swallowing a few times and trying desperately not to slip into the depths of blue that are Niall’s eyes. “Hello.”

“So, I’ve been waiting for absolute _ages_ for you to do something other than sit there on that bench and look at the lights and sneak glances at me,” Niall says and Zayn flushes, and this time, he’s _positive_ that it’s noticeable.

“Er,” Zayn says again, feeling his cheeks get even redder. His whole face is hot now, his ears and his neck. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Niall says, smiling softly, scooting even closer to Zayn. “I don’t mind making the first move.”

Zayn’s going to say something, _really he is_ (he’s not), but Niall kisses him before he has the chance.

It feels like eternity and only two seconds at the same time before Niall’s pulling back, that same soft smile pulling at his lips.

“The lights are beautiful, yeah?” he says and Zayn hardly pays a glance to the lights. Niall’s lips are red from their kiss and his nose is red from the cold and his blonde hair is messed up and his blue, blue, blue eyes are sparkling and Zayn can see the lights reflected in the glassiness of them and he wonders how he ever thought the lights were the most beautiful thing he’d ever see.

“They dim in comparison to you,” Zayn blurts before he can control himself and then he’s flushing once more, because even though he’s the artsy kid, he really never was all that poetic, but Niall looks so _pleased_ , that Zayn can’t find it in himself to take it back.

*

Zayn’s mother is looking at his latest canvas, and this time it’s still stretched across the easel and not in a heap on the floor. She’s being absolutely silent, and she’s not really moving, and when Zayn finally clamors out of bed to go look at her face, he’s startled to see she’s crying.

“Oh—mum,” he says quickly, taking her small frame in his arms. “I’m sorry—I didn’t want you to cry.”

But she’s laughing and half-heartedly pushing his arms away. “It’s _perfect_ , Zaynie,” she says, tears still dripping out of her eyes. “Look at it—you know it is.”

It’s Niall’s eyes, so, so, so blue, reflecting the millions of colourful lights above him. Zayn knows it doesn’t really look like that, because it’s mostly impressionist, but that’s what it looks like to him. And she’s right—he _is_ beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> i love ziall but i'm not that fond of this but eh
> 
>  
> 
> come talk to me or prompt me on tumblr [@rosalinesbenvolio](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com)!!


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